Monthly Archives: December 2012

Goodness me, I can’t believe how long ago the last post was written. So much has happened!

Well actually that’s not true. Not much has happened at all. Handbags at Dawn entered the Round Robin and didn’t get past the first round. In fact we didn’t win a match though I think we won a couple of rounds in the KOTH viaduct_pro match. It was as expected really. We had some good players in Handbags but as I said after the Show-match, we weren’t winnning conclusively and reliably enough against the teams we were facing. I’m not sure what we needed, certainly more practice together and it didn’t help that in the European Round Robin they changed the maps from Viaduct and Barnblitz which we’d practiced for the showmatch to Viaduct_pro and Barnblitz_pro which we hadn’t practiced at all.

However it was fun and such a strange experience playing in an all-female team with only female voices on Mumble. This was commented on by at least a couple of women, it felt so odd when you’re used to every other voice being male and you being often so much in the minority.

After it all, we didn’t disband the team. People enjoyed playing together and we’ve said that we’ll look to H@D entering similar tournaments in the future. We’ve certainly increased the number of women we each have on our Steam friends lists and I’ve a few more Highlander players that I can call upon should KCaLtL need any mercs if we enter the next ETF2L Highlander season.

The Transatlantic Highlander Showdown is over and Handbags at Dawn didn’t do too badly though unfortunately final bragging rights went to the North Americans. We lost on pl_Barnblitz, won on Viaduct (a King of the Hill map) and lost on pl_Badwater.

To be honest I wasn’t that surprised. The payload maps were played on their servers which meant that ping was a bit of an isssue, but over and above this, we hadn’t really been winning our payload games conclusively enough during our practice scrims to be able to be totally confident of victory.

We came close to winning the final map on Badwater though. We managed to hold first until there were just a few seconds left of the game but then they got it with the help of a well-timed uber on the cart. After that, the timer went up after each cap until by the last point we would have had to have held them for about 10 minutes to win.

But whatever, the games were fun (the main reason for it all) and a good time was had by all, and hopefully by the viewers on the stream as well.

It was strange playing in an all-female team and against an all-female team as well. Someone remarked how odd it felt referring to everyone as ‘she’ when ‘he’ is the usual default. So often in teams, the only female player plays Medic whilst the men go out and get the frags (female = healing/support role), there was a joke going round before the match wondering how teams of 9 medics would work. Here fragging, and everything else, was up to us and there could be no snide remarks about girls being carried!

We also had various comments beforehand from the community. On the ETF2L forum, posters stated a desire to tune in simply to hear our comms. This puzzled me. It was later clarified; apparently more than one female in comms = bitching and arguments so the thought of 9 of them blew males’ minds. Alright. There were also the predictable sexual comments in various forums and arguments over the very existence of girls’ teams…basically they were separatist and excluding. An argument I’ve yet to hear over the existence of the national TF2 teams. It’s true that I’d object to an all male team that refused females unless there was a specific reason (gay, male bodybuilders, castratos); why have such a team anyway when 99% of teams are 100% male. If the majority of players were female and a group of males wanted to play TF2 together for fun though, I’d like to think that I’d respect that as some in-game ‘man time’.

In the terms of a serious competitive all-female team, I’m torn. It’d be nice showing females can compete equally with males and be taken seriously but the final goal really is to have many good female Demos/scouts/soldiers etc playing on mixed teams. That in itself would be proof.

(I can see it…last Saturday, an 11 year old girl watching with her Dad, excited by seeing other girls playing games, thinks ‘what a bunch of no-name scrubs, I can do better’ and 5 years later is playing in Prem, because of course TF2 will go on forever)

Anyhow, it’s now preparation for the Round Robin on Sunday. We’re with the EU teams and Lady Fortress 2 with the NA teams. In between planning for our revenge match when we’ll send them packing, I wish them luck.